In “Mass-Market Epiphany,” professional lowest-common-denominator Ross Douthat shakes in fear because we Americans synthesize our religions, consider our mystical options, and generally enjoy our grand Jeu—the play of the Transcendent across a broad, globe-spanning, history-informed matrix of signs, rituals, faces, styles of dress, chants, worship-centers, and sacral texts.
It is true. We have been from the first a lovely patchwork of agnostics, Deists, Puritans, satanists, hippies, materialists, born-agains, Methodists, Quakers, Muslims, Buddhists, and so on, and so forth.
It is true. William James gave us our own meta-genius of religion (the genius of the study of religious geniuses), so we’ve always had options, a book of faiths from which to choose.
And then we invented Anton LaVey and televangelism; and I don’t care where he was born, we invented John Lennon, too, that ur-syncretic mentality and shaggy humanist-expressionistic chutzpah (see: Melville, Whitman, the Beats).
And then we took the internet from a Brit and made it what it is (mostly a font of Japanese pr0n), and the new religion of hyperconnectivity is as ours as it is anyone’s (though I suppose that obscures the grace of the rhizome, to speak of the nationality of it).
So, Ross, why are you so scared of the power of American adaption and adaptation? Why are the deaths of the old traditions and the births of new ones—deaths and births which are forever in process, but particularly, increasingly so since Nietzsche and World War I and globalism—anything to fear?
Douthat’s are the same old conservative anxieties that have always plagued us. Times are changing too quickly! We’ve traded in religion for new-fangled séances and snakeoils, and wires and tubes! Here’s Douthat waxing at his most lyrical:
Without them [severe, ole-skool religious practices], too, we give up on what’s supposed to be the deep promise of religious practice: that at any time, in any place, it’s possible to encounter the divine, the revolutionary and the impossible — and have your life completely shattered and remade.
I actually quite like his take on the promise of the shattering power of the Divine, the Mysterium’s ability to transcend our ability to even contemplate it, to put it in any box. But I disagree that the loss of ye old religions in any way diminishes man’s ability to experience this shattering.
The fact is, the Divine is never familiar except to those who experience it, and then it is unique, in each case. It has never been transferable via tradition; these traditions have never engendered true revelations, hence the constant defections from them, culminating in modernity. It is ridiculous to write of America as being more or less affected than other nation’s by the world’s gyring out of a dark age of cathedrals and sharia law.
If anything, America is simply more heterogeneously affected, because to be “American” is to be any number of such a wide range of types and sub-types—each of which may transmit the revolutionary and the impossible in different ways, with different signs, while still feeling the touch of the same unnameable Transcendent.
More expandable than Douthat’s thesis (”Americans = ‘losing’ religious feelings) is any thesis that looks at how the Divine strikes us, in the era of the hypertubez. The future saints may already preach on Facebook (shudder).
In any event, I look forward to abler writers’ analyses of the machines of religion as they mutate forward through history, ever new, ever the same (hierarchically organized to make money and control populations; individually mind-blowing, as experienced by individuals, within their own matrices of signs).
